How do you measure return on investment?

“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”

John Ruskin

Who am I going to become, versus, what am going to get? These are fundamentally different questions. I’ll admit that I have spent a lot of my time in life thinking about “return on investment” and that I haven’t spent nearly enough time time thinking about it at an experiential level.

Working hard is fun. It is awesome to put in the effort and the labor and see the results that come from it. But perhaps the most important results are the ones that we don’t measure through tangible “things” but are instead the experiences we have gained and the relationships we have built. Those are the things that shape us, mold us and create the platform that we build upon for the future.

To measure success more holistically I think I need to spend some more time thinking about the question “who am I going to become from this effort?”